The Contest Is Toe-to-Toe and Pawn-to-Pawn

Published: May 10, 1997

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Computers already compose in a rudimentary fashion, he said, ''but what if you've got every single piece of music by every composer mapped out in little chunks and the computer is putting them together in different ways, and what if you couldn't tell these from the works of Beethoven or Mozart?''

Would it matter? Beautiful music is beautiful music, and people will not stop composing it because a computer can, any more than chess players are going to stop playing chess.

''The point is,'' said Mr. Friedel, who has a degree in philosophy, ''in the future, we're going to have computers performing like the best human beings in all sorts of ways. We're going to know they're doing something incredibly primitive to achieve this result. But we're going to have to deal with it.''

Dealing with it is what the Deep Blue team does in the war room, a cramped television control booth with a couple of video screens and the detritus of a never-ending lunch scattered around. During every game, the programmers, along with Mr. Benjamin and Miguel Illescas, another grandmaster, mostly spend their time trying out the moves that Deep Blue tells them it is mulling over.

The computer itself is in an adjoining room, but its thought processes are being reproduced on a screen in the corner, lines and lines of minute, coded numbers incessantly scrolling upward. The process it follows is to look ahead in the game three or four moves, analyze all the possibilities numerically, and select the one with the highest score. And though this is only an initial suggestion, it tends to send the programmers into nervous, hand-wringing action, moving pieces around the chessboard, often accompanied by head scratching and mumbling.

Meanwhile, Deep Blue has begun to look further into the game along the trees of possibility suggested by the selected move. And sometimes, the initially selected move shrinks in appeal as the search proceeds deeper. In that case, it will return to the beginning and look for a move that will yield a better result. This can take up to a few minutes, but the computer is programmed not to take more than a third of its remaining time for any one move.

So if initially, taking a Kasparov pawn with a rook yields a rating of say, 50, and that number shrinks to 27 by the time Deep Blue has examined its consequences 10 moves hence, it would try other possibilities.

(A pawn advantage for Deep Blue would register as 100, so a score of 50 would indicate Deep Blue's advantage is the equivalent of half a pawn.)

In any case, the trying of various moves and the resulting scores appearing on screen naturally heats up the human activity in the room.

''I don't like that,'' Mr. Illescas said, at one point, to himself. ''Garry has chances.'' A few moments later, he reversed himself.

''We have better chances,'' he said.

All of this lends the match a palpable eerieness, which is perhaps most evident watching the champion himself in the match room. During each game, Mr. Kasparov has engaged in his customary brow-furrowing, chin-clenching, eyebrow-raising, jaw muscle-bunching and occasional nervous pacing that has unnerved many a human opponent.

The discombobulating element is that against Deep Blue, his fierce combativeness has no target. Across the board sits someone with a placid expression, a calmness that has to be infuriating. He is not a chess expert; he is just doing what he's told, a robot's robot.

Joe Hoane, one of the three I.B.M. researchers who have been the arms of Deep Blue in this match, said the three hours he spent sitting across from Mr. Kasparov on Tuesday gave him the first chance he had had in months to think about chess, and not computers.

''I don't play well,'' Mr. Hoane said, ''but this was a real chance to observe the beauty of what was going on.''

And how did he feel out there, not only across from the legendary champion in the champion's milieu, but, in some sense, on the frontier?